(i) Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, an image forming system, and an image forming method.
(ii) Related Art
With an increase in globalization, there are more and more cases where printers and controllers are installed in various counties or regions, and the need is increasing for taking environmental characteristics of various regions including extremely cold regions, dry regions, hot-and-humid regions, and dusty regions into consideration. In addition, since ink-jet printers and the like are relatively sensitive to low temperatures and dryness. Preferably, an ink-jet printer is operated in an environment in which the temperature and the humidity are kept at a certain level; however, there is no guarantee that such conditions are satisfied depending on the countries or regions and it is necessary to control the internal environment of a printer in accordance with the external environment around the printer in order to maintain a certain quality level.
In terms of quality control, an update is performed for applying a patch with which bugs found after a product release may be corrected; however, it requires a certain time period to perform an update, and thus there is an issue as to at which timing an update is to be performed.
Even when an update is performed by estimating a time period during which a system is idle or determining an idle state, there may be the case where the timing at which the update is performed is not always an appropriate timing. That is, when an update is performed for a control unit of a system, control of the internal environment of the system also enters an idle state. Thus, in the case where the external environment of the system is not preferable for the system, the internal environment may be affected by the external environment and become deteriorated. In the case where the internal environment of the system has deteriorated, it ends up requiring an extra time until the internal environment recovers to a certain range set initially.